Conventionally, at the time of depositing money using a deposit machine that performs credit transaction of bills at banking institutions, the deposited bills are recognized and classified into four categories of genuine bills determined to be authentic (including fit and unfit bills), counterfeit bills determined to be unauthentic, suspect bills with uncertain authenticity which cannot be determined as genuine bills, and rejected bills due to overlapping each other or skew. In addition, there has been a process that, when a bill is recognized as any one of the counterfeit bill, the suspect bill, and the rejected bill other than the genuine bill, the bill is returned to a customer as an unacceptable bill.
It is a crime to use counterfeit bills, and when the counterfeit bill or the suspect bill is used, it is necessary to check carefully whether it is a counterfeit bill. Further, the counterfeit and suspect bills are important evidence that can be used as an exhibit of a criminal act.
Therefore, as a technique that can confirm the counterfeit bill and ensure the evidence of using the counterfeit bill, a paper sheet processing apparatus has been proposed, which includes a user specifying unit that specifies a user, an inlet unit in which paper sheets to be deposited are placed, a feeding unit that sequentially feeds in the paper sheets placed in the loading unit, a recognition unit that recognizes the paper sheets fed by the feeding unit with classification of the paper sheets into four categories of genuine bills, counterfeit bills, suspect bills, and rejected bills, an escrow unit that temporarily holds the genuine bills, counterfeit bills, and the suspect bills other than the rejected bills identified by the recognition unit, a plurality of storage units that store the temporarily held bills in the escrow unit, and a rejection unit that stacks therein the paper sheets determined as the rejected bills for returning them to a customer (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-310594).
Further, there has been a bill processing apparatus that has a plurality of bills determination parameters so that denominations to be handled and countries can be easily changed (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-164458).
Specifically, the bill processing apparatus includes a database that can be referred to by a plurality of country codes and denomination codes associated with the country codes, and stores the bill determination parameters for each country code and denomination code. The bill determination parameters include a denomination determination parameter, an authenticity determination parameter, a fitness determination parameter or the like. By changing the country code and the denomination code, it can be easy to perform setting change to a country different from the country set in the bill processing apparatus and to a different denomination type.
The bill processing apparatus also stores an individual user parameter, which does not depend on the country code or denomination code, and indicates a fitness detection level and an authenticity determination level according to preference of the user. For example, a set threshold for the fitness determination can be changed based on the individual user parameter to reduce the amounts of bills determined as an unfit bill. By use of the individual user parameterm, the bill processing apparatus can perform bill determination according to the situations of the user's circumstances due to the country and environment where the apparatus is installed.
In the conventional paper sheet processing apparatus described above, the recognized bills are classified into four categories of the genuine bills, the counterfeit bills, the suspect bills, and the rejected bills, to be returned to the customer or brought into the processing apparatus, associated with each categorization according to a recognition result, and various transaction information are recorded.
As for Euro bills, category classification is performed based on sample media held in the national central bank (NCB) of each country, separately from the category classification set in the European Central Bank (ECB).
However, in the conventional paper sheet processing apparatus, only single type of category classification has been possible, and thus the evaluation of the sample media is performed at the central bank for each country where the paper sheet processing apparatus is installed, to perform category classification by a determination of the NCB each time, and tuning is performed for each country, to which the paper sheet processing apparatus is sold, to change firm.
That is, the final determination of category classification is performed at the central bank of each country. Because category criteria and determination logic are different for each country, with the conventional paper sheet processing apparatus described above, a program needs to be managed by allocating one apparatus for each country.
Further, in the conventional bill processing apparatus described above that can easily set the country and denomination type, the merit of its functions are not useful. That is, in an area where plural countries uses the same bills as in Europe using Euro bills, the denomination type does not need to be changed, and there is no point in changing the setting of the country. Therefore, to handle the difference in category classification criteria for each country in each denomination, the individual user parameter needs to be reset when the country is changed.